incumbent,--that is, where the
feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a
place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of
the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store
sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as
timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and
character are to be found in such a place.

This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden. When
strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever
was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house
shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth,
the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist. They were
also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak,
celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet.
Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the
porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year '87, and that
the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary
laboratory which had seen the forming of many Congressional orators.

In so confident a way was this information imparted, that visitors were
compelled to receive it in all humbleness, and as a matter of course.
They could only feign that Twynintuft had been a household word from
their tenderest infancy, and that they have made pilgrimage to Foxden to
gaze upon the earthly abiding-place of this remarkable man. Accordingly,
young ladies sent their best respects from the hotel, and "Would dear
Mrs. Widesworth spare them a few leaves from her grandfather's oak?" And
simple young gentlemen, with a morbid passion for notorieties and moral
sentiments, forwarded little books, bound in sheepskin heavily gilt,
inscribed, "World-Thoughts of My Country's Gifted Minds," and "Mrs.
Widesworth is requested to write any maxim which her experience of life
may have suggested on page 209 of this volume, just between the remarks
of the Living Skeleton and the autograph of the Idiot Albino."

If invited to visit any one of consideration in Foxden, you would no
sooner have deposited your travelling-bag and subsided into the
arm-chair than you would perceive a curious nervous twitching about the
features of your host, which would finally culminate in these, accents
of patronizing triumph:--"My dear Sir, I shall be glad to take you
across the str